Migrating, Reading and Leaving Books Behind
A Guest Post by Monica Nastase
Welcome to Beyond the Bookshelf, a community of readers and writers sharing unique perspectives on life and literature through thought-provoking essays, captivating interviews, and influential books as we explore the challenges of life's transformative journey.
Dear Readers,
This week, I am excited to share a guest post from
. Monica was born and raised in Romania during the Communist regime and its aftermath. After graduating from college with a degree in Journalism, she attended East Tennessee State University on a scholarship to pursue her Master’s degree. She has lived in Miami, Frankfurt, and now in Barcelona for the past 13 years.A self-proclaimed introvert who prefers the company of books to people, Monica is now exploring her extroverted side. Having found her tribe and her self-confidence, she is more comfortable in her own skin and enjoys the opportunity to share her ideas and opinions through writing and conversation.
Monica speaks five languages (English, Spanish, French, German, and Romanian) and loves the brain exercise of going in and out of languages with different people. Besides reading and writing, she love to paint, play board games, travel by train, and hike. Monica enjoys learning and often finds herself exploring educational rabbit holes to see how many different topics connect.
In this season of her life, Monica appreciates the opportunity to spend as much time as possible in nature. Walking in a forest or a local park helps her to feel grounded, calm, and happy.
I have come to value Monica’s writing over the past few months and I hope you enjoy her essay.
The Miami Beach Regional Library holds two or three dozen of my own books. Fifteen years ago, I donated them to the city before moving back to Europe, as I couldn’t afford the high cost of shipping them around the world. Thus, a part of me is still in the city I loved living in, through some of my favorite reads. A thread of stories and ideas still connects me through time and space with that narrow island and that pale yellow beachfront apartment building I called home for one year.
After dropping the books at the library reception, I imagined how they would place them on the shelves next to which I had squatted on the carpeted floor and read so many times. I imagined how the books would go each under the right section, on the same shelves which I’d often browse myself in search of little gems to read. My books would hopefully become someone else’s new little gems to discover.
When moving to a new city and a new country on my own — and I’ve done it six times so far — I looked for bookstores and the public library even before looking for a community. In every new, unfamiliar town, spaces filled with books became my first comfort zones.
Leaving traces of my reads back in Miami Beach was not a first-time deed. I had also left my Master’s textbooks and study notebooks back in Johnson City, TN, in a couple of cardboard boxes, in my host family’s attic. Even though I was leaving Tennessee, never to return, I was fond of them and didn’t want to throw them away. They contained lessons about communication theory and ethics, gender and communication, cultural analyses of movies and qualitative research of the media. All that was a testament of my own becoming. The information stayed behind in the attic of that burgundy-colored house, but I took with me around the world the knowledge I had acquired from them.
Books have been a companion throughout my life, my invisible friend and travel buddy. From the childhood days of spending entire afternoons reading, splayed on the living room Persian carpet, to all the years of living as a foreigner, in all the places I’ve called home.
The very first book
One of the first books I remember reading and re-reading was an Italian writer’s children’s novel called Cuore. Even though I read it in my native Romanian at the time, the book cover still had the title written in the original Italian — Cuore, which means ‘heart’. Cuore told the story of the family life and school adventures of an 11-year-old boy, whom we discover through his diary. It was a fantasy land to step into, an Italian school unlike my own, a sanctuary from an otherwise difficult family life. It set me off on a path to compulsively search for characters in books along whom to go on adventures. Everything I couldn’t live and feel in my real childhood, I felt by reading books.
I also loved to pronounce the word cuore, rounding my mouth around the letters, lengthening the ‘o’. It felt tender, hopeful, it resonated with my own 11-year-old heart. It made me want to learn Italian when I grew up.
I never learned Italian, but I did learn four other languages besides my mother tongue. Reading in different languages is like holding threads of different colors and weaving a multicolored braid to feed your mind with. Nowadays I read almost exclusively in English. But when I pick up a book in Romanian or in Spanish, or when I read the occasional article in French, I access memories from different moments in my life when I was immersed in those cultures, or lived on those lands. I associate each language — and reading in it — with a particular phase of my life.
A favorite book: Educated by Tara Westover
I have to admit, the main reason I was attracted to this book was its title. As I’d been brought up with the notion that formal education and degrees are the utmost sign of a successful, respectable life, Educated sounded like the book for me. But reading Tara’s story I entered an opposite world, where a survivalist Mormon family homeschooled their children in a severely abusive and labor-intensive home.
I was hooked by Tara’s story of seeking normality outside the home, of being the odd one out in her family. When at 17 she got into a college without having received formal education until then, I saw that as a display of courage to live the life she considered right, despite her family’s opinion. Going in search of her own happiness was a mirror to who I was becoming at the time of reading her memoir. I loved the part where she made it to Harvard and then to Cambridge University. It was an academic journey I also fantasized about, as a way out from the emotional trials of my own childhood.
Educated is a bildungsroman of an average girl in an average American family, and her journey of individuating from her family of origin. Average meaning that could happen to anyone, albeit not to everyone. Just like my life path, Tara also used formal education and books to escape a challenging childhood and move far away from home. I took the book as a permission slip to continue pursuing the life I wanted for myself, despite what family or society tries to push on me.
The heroine in Educated didn’t have to fight tigers in the jungle, or to escape slavery. She had to escape her closest people, the ones who were supposed to protect her and love her well. To me, Tara from Educated is the female version of Pip from Great Expectations or of Huck Finn from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
One of my favorite parts of the book is the ending:
“The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made [my sixteen-year-old self]. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.”
The art of a sentence
Between Cuore and Educated, I’ve read more books than I can remember. Books in various languages, a mosaic of paper tomes with colorful soft covers, which made me into who I am today. Books are my comfort zone, they are my travel buddies on my solo travels, they are my constant companion I carry in my bag wherever I go.
Reading books allows me to experience life situations I will never be in, travel to places and historic times I’ll never go to, it allows me to get a glimpse of fields I will never work in. But maybe even more importantly, reading beautifully written books allows me to experience the art of a beautiful sentence, an unforgettable paragraph or a striking turn of phrase. The art of creative writing, of painting images with words, is one of the magical moments of reading for me. Another way of connecting to the writer, to another human’s soul.
You can read more of Monica’s writing on her publication.
Until next time…
 | A guest post by
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Thank you, Matthew for publishing not just my essay but a lovely introduction! Grateful for this.
This is just lovely! Thank you for giving us a peek inside the books that touched your heart. I, too, have left books in multiple cities, and I'm going to adopt your perspective about them — I love thinking that parts of me are still there, and maybe they're interacting with other people in my stead.